For those of you shooting in raw that haven't seen the news posted around the net about this yet, Sony has an update to their Image Data Converter SR software available on some of their sites now (for example, the sony.net international site and the Sony Europe site), and I'd expect to see it on more of their region specific sites soon, too. Here's the link I used to update my software to Version 3.2:

It's rather amazing how much improvement they've made in the Noise Reduction area from what I can see of results testing it against the older 3.1 version, using both Auto and Manual Noise Reduction settings. I'm also seeing Mac users reporting significantly better performance on Snow Leopard. I've only tried it under Win 7 and really didn't pay any attention to the speed before and after the update.

If you expand the Overview section on this page on the Sony Europe site, then click one of the Download Links, you can see what they say is improved:

Thanks Jim for sending me here,
I do shoot in RAW and currently have been using LR2, will this converter be better than LR. I guess I would need to run the photos through the converter before having them sent to LR? Software is another learning curve.
Maggie